O Canada, Let Me Pour You A Glass of Wine

KELOWNA, BC--The sun-kissed vineyards here in British Columbia, along the shores of Lake Okanagan, produce terrific wines. Locals are justly proud of them, but still feel the need for "protection" from wines produced in California, Oregon and Washington. It's a dispute, according to Bloomberg News, that will probably require intervention from a NAFTA arbitration panel.

If Canada is known internationally as a wine-producing country, it's probably for the superb ice wines grown on Ontario's Niagara peninsula, brands like Inniskillin and Jackson-Triggs. That's about to change. Whole Foods three years ago ran a month-long promotion of premium Canadian table wines, specifically eight wines from BC's spectacular Okanagan Valley in a promotion co-sponsored by the BC Wine Institute.

"It's ironic that we can buy wines from Croatia, Turkey and South Africa more readily than bottles from just across the border," said Seattle-based Erez Klein, the regional wine buyer for Whole Foods in the Northwest.

Now, before you turn up your nose at Canadian wine, consider this: not long ago Californians were pooh-poohing wine from Washington and Oregon. So let's do a quick review of British Columbia's wine industry.

You might be surprised to learn that the Okanagan has the potential to produce some of the best wine on the continent. Why? During the growing season, the Okanagan gets the most daylight in North America. It needs to be said, from time to time: It isn't heat that ripens grapes, it's light. The engine that powers plants isn't hot air, but photosynthesis.

Long hours of the most intense sunlight in North America provide ripening power for classic grape varieties, not just on the Naramata Bench (photo) but the length of the entire region. At 50 degrees N, it's at the same latitude as the heart of Germany's Rheingau, and even further north than Champagne -- a freakish accident in the crumpled geology of the Cascades that created a unique string of protected valleys from Vernon (at the northern end of Lake Okanagan) 100 miles south to Osoyoos on the US border.

When I first traveled to the Okanagan 30 years ago, there were barely a dozen wineries, and they were making wine from cultivars and hybrids. Stone fruit (orchards of apricots and peaches) was the crop of choice. The warm lakefront properties, surrounded by craggy mountains, had made the Okanagan into BC's preferred inland resort. "Switzerland on steroids" is how one newcomer described it. Then along came NAFTA, and the local vineyards, planted with inferior grapes, lost their protected status. Out they came, to be replaced with noble European vinifera varieties like riesling and pinot noir. Not unlike Oregon and Washington's wine makers in the 1980s, there was great enthusiasm and pride in the potential of a growing industry.

Not entirely unrelated, the Okanagan already had a tourism infrastructure; if anything, vineyards had to compete with vacation homes for the most desirable bench lands.

On the other hand, Canadian wines did not have to compete directly against US competitors in grocery stores. The Canadians require US wines to be displayed in a separate section of the store, which the Americans regarded as harming their sales. (US wines account for about 14 percent of the market in Canada.)

So for now BC wines are sold alongside canned peaches in the grocery section, while imported wines and spirits are relegated to the store-within-a-store.

The result is becoming an international tempest and is on its way to an arbitration panel within the NAFTA framework. Fewer than two dozen of the 1,300 retail wine outlets in British Columbia are affected, but, as the say, it's the principle of the thing.

In an email, Miles Prodan (the CEO of the BC Wine Institute), argues that there's a "massive US trade surplus for US wine in Canada." The surplus was "bought and paid for" with markups and tariff reductions, he says, which have been negotiated over the past three decades and are "reasonable in terms of what the US has in place."

Ronald Holden is a Seattle-based food and wine writer. His latest book is Forking Seattle.

I've lived and worked in the Pacific Northwest as a reporter and editor for the past 40 years, in print, broadcast, and online media. I've been writing reviews since I tasted my first Little League hot dog with yellow mustard; since then I've published five books about wine...